New images have been released by the London Legacy Development Corporation of the cultural district to emerge on the 2012 London Olympics site. The Stratford Waterfront site scheme (Olympicopolis) is expected to create 3,000 jobs, attract 1.5 million visitors per year and provide a £2.8 billion boost to the economy of Stratford and surrounds.
Bob Allies, partner of the masterplan architects, Allies and Morrison, said, “One of the most exciting aspects of this project has been the collaboration, between the LLDC, the cultural partners, the three architectural practices and the wider consultant team.
“What we are making is an extraordinary new piece of city, a crucial part of the urban framing of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with five individual buildings shaping and sharing a common public realm.
“For me personally, having worked on both the Games and Legacy masterplans, it is particularly satisfying to be able to play a part in this most recent stage of the process.”
Each building is unique but draws on a common palette of references to Stratford’s industrial heritage. Befitting of the strong identities of their individual institutions, each will be distinctive in presence yet form part of a family, reinforcing the idea of a unified place rather than a collection of disparate objects. At the scale of the individual buildings, Allies and Morrison is designing the London College of Fashion, the new cultural building and residential towers; O’Donnell + Toumey are the architects of the V&A East and Sadler’s Wells East and Arquitecturia Camps Felip is designing the Carpenters Land Bridge.
The Cultural and Education District will be the single largest project of its kind since the legacy of the 1851 Great Exhibition and Exhibition Road in South Kensington. Our work on this project is the latest chapter in a longstanding engagement with the legacy commitment to east London, which began with the masterplan that first secured the Games.
A planning application is to be submitted in the winter of 2016 with anticipated completion of the cultural and education buildings by 2020/2021 and the residential development is due to open in 2022.
Source: Allies and Morrison